Story writing workshop at Ottie and the Bea, and the surprising delight of The Plan

I have spent the most inspiring, rewarding and best of all fun morning with two ten-year-old writers helping them to plan and create an original short story.

We met in the events tent behind Ottie and the Bea, a toyshop full of treats to fire the imagination, and had a workbook each to get us started.

My writers were Flora and Daisy, friends who confessed they didn't much like the planning side of things and usually preferred to dive straight in and get on with writing their ideas down. Sadly, creative writing lessons and teachers don't much like that and at school they are always made to PLAN. In fact, a lot of the time, they don't even get to write the story at all. Just THE PLAN. I remember myself how much of a shackle that felt (still does, if I'm honest ...).

Well, we weren't in a classroom and I'm not a Teacher. I'm just a reader who spent her childhood with her nose in a book and has been lucky enough to go on and make that her job for the past twenty years. So the normal rules of Learning Objectives and get-it-done-before-maths and What You Need to Learn for Your Common Entrance just didn't apply. I even let them off the hook of grammar and punctuation and spelling. After all, as Flora says, in real life you have an editor for that.

No, what we were concentrating on was the Story. And most importantly, how to make your writing have an emotional pull and a strong enough narrative that your readers can't resist reading on until the very end, and then still want more to come.

Which isn't to say that I let them get away without a PLAN. Oh no. But we crept up on it. We realised that what planning really is, is thinking about your ideas first. As Terry Pratchett puts it - telling yourself the story - so that when you come to write, or to put the final full stop to your writing, you've given your readers the best experience you can.

We started by talking about what Flora and Daisy like to read. For two close friends, they have quite different tastes: Daisy loves action and the excitement of wondering what could happen next, whereas Flora claims not to like adventure so much. She's reading Anne of Green Gables at the moment, and really loving the way Anne goes off on little diversions: the imaginary world she creates within her own 'real' world.

But in spite of our differences, we found we are all Hunger Games fans (even if Daisy does prefer Divergent), and we talked about the opening scene: what it is about it that makes you want to read on. And perhaps surprisingly, given how when we first started to talk about it we thought it might be the adventure and the excitement that made us love it, when we read the first paragraph we realised that what draws us in is the emotional pull: the first thing we know about our heroine, before we even know her name, is that she loves her sister, looks out for her, and there's something that's giving her nightmares.

And that, for me, is the difference between the Creative Writing you get taught at school and the kind of writing that gets you read and published. It's not about whether you've used the most interesting words in your description, or been clear about putting your sequence of events in the right order. It's about whether you've made your reader care.

Daisy's PLAN: What sort of story do you want to write?

So, in a four hour session today, that is what I tried to show and teach to Daisy and Flora. After we talked about what made us care, we started to brainstorm: how do we want to make our readers feel? what kind of a book do we want to write? Do we want it to end with a gasp of shock, or a sigh of relief?

They were brilliant: bursting with ideas that we captured as quickly as possible in our notebooks, never a bad one - but sometimes one that's not right for now, or this story, to file away for another time. And gradually as we talked, sometimes answering the questions I had set, sometimes shooting off on a long storytelling riff, it became clear that there was a value in planning, if that is what we were doing. Especially if you don't think about it as 'planning' but instead just let your imagination run wild.

We saw that, had we followed our instincts and just started writing the first moment we sat down, we would have ended up with a gypsy boy with a monkey for a pet who it turned out when we thought our story through a bit more needed to be a long-lost mother with no pet at all. We might have written an older brother who saved his sister from drowning only to tragically lose his own life, leaving her with a lifelong fear of the sea. Only when we thought about it some more, for the purpose of our story today, we thought that might be a fate better given to our heroine's father, explaining why her grief-stricken mother might have given her up for adoption and run away with the gypsies in the first place.

You see? There were any number of ways that our story could have gone. And none of them was right or wrong. But in the three hours that we spent 'planning' we were able to see which strand suited our story the best. We had, by the end of it, and after a refreshing field trip to eat our sandwiches in the sunshine, taking in some great sources of inspiration along the way (the cafe next door, great for dialogue and characters, the newsagent with its papers and magazines full of story ideas, and jokey cards that remind us of what makes us laugh, the launderette for people-watching, the alley-way to imagine dark and lonely at night and give ourselves the chills ...), a PLAN.

Perhaps not so detailed a Plan as, say, Malorie Blackman or Tony Bradman might have, but a Plan nevertheless.

Flora's PLAN: Who is your central character? 

And that meant that Flora and Daisy could write their story together. It also meant that, when they were writing, they were able to concentrate on the words and the emotion, the effect they were having on their reader, rather than focusing only on What Happens Next.

And even with The Plan, it wasn't all plain sailing. We had our broad outline of this happens then this then this. We had descriptions and motives for our main characters. But moment by moment, that's what we needed to draw out now. Sometimes it was easy - the opening sentence 'Go on, get in!' popped right out and gave us a great start. But then we got worried about whether we needed to pause the story and get some description of our characters in there (that old School Rules of Creative Writing trying to get a look-in again).

It was getting quite hot in the tent now, not much air and a lot of sunshine, and after lunch anyway is a drowsy time. So we stood up and started acting. It wasn't a drama class, we didn't care about performance and projection. But we could try out our dialogue, decide if we needed speech or thought, see what our story needed for pace and excitement and to keep the reader hooked, work out how it might feel to be in that boat with Bonny as Becky pushed her away from the shore . . .

By two o'clock, Flora and Daisy had collaborated seamlessly and written their First Chapter. We had spent three quarters of our time together Planning. And - yes - if we had sat right down and started writing the moment we met, we could perhaps have finished our tale. But I can tell you that every word that they wrote has been crafted and carefully considered. And I think it shows.

We three are Planning converts. In fact, we'd go so far as to say that Planning can be fun. Because what it really is, is letting your imagination off its leash, to sniff out all that's interesting and bring you back tit-bits so that when you sit down to really tell your story it has all the best bits in the right places.

Thank you, Flora and Daisy. I learned a lot today, and I look forward to reading your story all the way through. We've got a great Plan, so I kind of know how it ends, but I bet you still pack it full of surprises.

Chapter One, Page One (by Daisy)

Chapter One, Page Two (by Flora)

Flora and Daisy have vowed to meet up in the holidays, or back at school, to finish writing their story together. When they do, they'll send it to me, for typing and publishing in an inklingstories limited edition exclusively for Ottie and the Bea. Watch this space!